New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

Customer Scenario(R) Mapping

January 29, 2015

We all know that you get what you measure. When we experience a dysfunctional organization, we know that we should be suspicious of the objectives that managers and employees are motivated to achieve. In fact, based on the experiences we’re having, we can often guess at the firm’s compensation structure and/or culture. Here’s one example that is top of mind for me: Someone hit my car when it was parked. Their insurer was GEICO. Within 30 minutes of the accident, GEICO called me, told me they were taking responsibility and arranged for appraisal and repair. GEICO is obviously optimizing rapid claim settlement for “no brainer” claims.

U.S. Healthcare Industry: Focused on Productivity and Quality Metrics

There’s been a lot of discussion about how broken our healthcare system is. We pay for transactions, not outcomes. Physicians are measured on their “productivity,” e.g., how many patients can you see (and bill for) in a day? Hospital staff are rewarded for getting patients out of beds as quickly as possible, but fined if that patient winds up back in the hospital within 3 weeks.

August 28, 2014

In the northern hemisphere, early September is a natural time to take stock and to set priorities. As our kids go back to school, we adults find ourselves in the same mindset: excited about learning new things, accomplishing something important, and having fun “playing” with our colleagues and customers. So, it’s a natural time to set some goals and priorities. Why not start by taking stock of how to improve your customers’ end-to-end experience of using your products and services, in doing business with you, and in doing their jobs.

I was reminded of how important this is as I listened to a long-time client, the CEO of a high tech company, recount how valuable he found an off-site strategy meeting to be. He used the Blue Ocean Strategy method to lead his team through a strategic planning session. “The most valuable part for us,” he reported, “was thinking about what’s going on in our customers’ lives before they learn about our products and after they’ve been using them for a while. When we really drilled into those customers’ (users, decision-makers, influencers, maintainers) contexts, we realized how much more we could be doing to make their lives easier.” As a result, his team created a much more targeted partner “shelf space” strategy, changed their account reps’ MBOs to focus more on after sales relationship building, and refocused their social media focus and their documentation to target customers’ “moments of truth.”

May 24, 2014

We’ve had a lot of demand for Customer Journey Mapping recently. Perhaps it’s the customer experience flavor du jour. But we’re happy that so many companies are paying renewed attention to the quality of the end-to-end customer experience they deliver.

We’ve been mapping customer experiences for over 25 years with clients in many different industries—way before the term Customer Journey Mapping was invented. What’s good about a single Customer Journey Map is that it represents the end-to-end experience you want to provide from the first moment a customer engages with your brand until their last breath (or until they no longer need you). What’s challenging about creating a single end-to-end Customer Journey is that every organization has a lot of different types of customers in different contexts at different stages. And different customers in different contexts need and care about different things. In this first article about our approach to Customer Journey Mapping, we explain how you can capture the requirements of your key target customer segments using Customer Scenario Maps and then combine the key patterns from those scenarios to create an end-to-end Customer Journey Map that accurately reflects all of their needs.

March 21, 2014

Many of the articles we write and many of the consulting, training, and mentoring projects we do involve improving customer experience and/or designing new and/or improved products, services, and business models. Like all consultants, we have a set of methods and tools we use. We call ours Customer Co-Design, and it includes a method for facilitating workshops including customers and cross-functional stakeholders who co-design new experiences and/or products and services together. We call this workshop Customer Scenario® Mapping. We use it within organizations to help internal employees build consensus about the ideal customer experience they want to deliver. When used in this way—Customer Scenario Mapping is most similar to the technique of Customer Journey Mapping. We also use this method to facilitate co-design workshops with end-customers (business and/or consumers), partners, internal stakeholders, and external stakeholders. What’s fun and useful about this approach is that it’s “customers all the way down” – you start with the customers designing their ideal way to “do their jobs” and then all the supporting layers and business processes neatly align around the customers’ key moments of truth and success metrics.

This week, Ronni Marshak shares the stories of how our Customer Scenario Mapping technique has been co-designed with our clients and their customers for almost three decades now.

In 2014: Deliver Breakthrough Customer-Centric Results

What if you could deliver fantastic results in 2014: exciting new products, great customer uptake, leave your competitors in the dust, and deliver incredible value to your end-customers which will translate into broader reach, faster adoption, higher revenues, and lower costs? You can. It’s simple to do. Select the right target customers and get them engaged all the way through your planning, development, piloting, launch, and rapid iteration of any customer-impacting projects. You’ll inject customer-centricity into all of those steps in any project by engaging customers (or target end-users) to help. You’ll have guaranteed early adopters, and they’ll help you cross the proverbial chasm by ensuring that you’ve considered and dealt with all the potential roadblocks to adoption.

September 30, 2013

There’s nothing worse than recruiting customers to work with you to come up with new solutions and then falling flat on your face because you weren’t actually able to deliver what customers wanted. That has happened to us and our clients a few times. But we’ve learned a lot from those experiences. And you are the beneficiaries. We’ve distilled what we’ve learned from our failures and near misses into a set of clear success metrics.

July 02, 2012

One of the “Aha’s” I’ve had over the many years that I’ve been working with companies to improve their customer-impacting business processes is this: Most firms don’t design for exceptions and breakdowns. They design for the “happy path.” Yet, we all know that what makes or breaks most customer relationships is how your organization/people/process/partners and technologies react when things go awry.

What Do Crisis Specialists Do? There are companies that specialize in handling crises and emergencies (emergency road service, ambulances, hospitals, police and fire departments, insurance companies). These organizations specialize in:

Providing 24x7 personal service with a great deal of empathy and appropriate resources

Getting to the scene/person quickly (within minutes)

Anticipating all contingencies (have all emergency supplies handy)

Coordinating multiple service providers

Triage (fix what can be prevented/fixed before you deal with what can’t be saved)

Great execution/follow up (the scope of this varies depending on the purview of the crisis specialist)

April 20, 2012

When you invite customers to spend time with you to help co-design your next-gen products, services, or customer experience, you want them to be comfortable and at ease. Any event planner knows that creating an enjoyable meeting or memorable event requires a lot of attention to detail. What we’ve learned, in over 25 years of running these sessions, is that even GREAT event planners don’t know all the details you’ll need to be on top of to ensure a high-quality, smooth-running brainstorming session.

What Are the Subtle Differences that Make a Difference in a Well-Planned Customer Co-Design Event?

Clients often comment that there are so many logistics to think about, in addition to all the big picture, substantive stuff they need to handle (like making sure your top execs actually participate and that they leave their Smartphones in their pockets!). So they don’t want to pay attention to these subtle, but important details:

1. Securing a sufficiently large room (or multiple rooms) with the venue. You need enough room so that all activities can be done comfortably and without too much running from room to room.

April 05, 2012

One of the things that we find hardest to get across to clients is the amount of attention they need to pay when planning for a customer co-design event, such as one of our half-day or full-day Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. No matter what techniques or methods you plan to use when you engage with your customers, you owe it to them to be respectful of the gift of their time and insights and creativity they’re offering.

What Most Companies Now Do Well in Planning for Customer Co-Design:

What we find is that most “enlightened” companies now do a few things right:

1. They have high-level buy-in to run one or more customer co-design activities.

2. They have a full-time, experienced and respected person in charge of the activity (this is usually someone in a manager or director role, whose day job centers around gathering customer requirements and input).

3. They connect the customer co-design/requirements gathering to real, funded projects/initiatives so there is an execution engine in place.

Where Most Companies Fail in Planning for Customer Co-Design:

1. They don’t get their high-level executives engaged early enough. The sponsor’s peers and bosses aren’t sufficiently “in the loop” to benefit from the many insights gleaned from customers before they actually come to the session. (If you’re listening/watching/reading the pre-session interviews, you are able to gain early insights and get a jumpstart on addressing opportunities.)

2. They don’t involve ancillary stakeholders and subject matter experts until it’s really too late. As you talk with customers before the design event, you’re going to encounter issues/opportunities that are beyond the scope of the currently funded projects you’re working on. So you need to find the people in your organization who ARE working on those things and engage them early.

3. They don’t get senior-enough executives to spend this quality, contextful time working side-by-side with customers. It never ceases to amaze me when CEOs, COOs, EVPs—all the people with real clout in an organization—find better things to do than to devote a day with a couple dozen really insightful customers co-designing new products, services, and experiences. Yet these same high-level execs will scrape off time (and considerable budget) for internally-focused, belly button-gazing company off-sites and strategic planning meetings. I just don’t get it!

We run these co-design sessions all the time, many times a year, in many different industries. Now, many of our clients are equipped to run their own sessions through the training and certification program we offer in our particular customer co-design methodology, Customer Scenario® Mapping. Here’s a guide to planning a Customer Scenario Mapping session that we’ve prepared for our clients. It should come in handy for anyone who is planning to embark on similar endeavor.

September 08, 2011

We’ve been thinking a lot about web site design recently. In particular, how to ensure that your prospects and customers know what they can DO on your site and understand how what you offer fits with their needs. One of our favorite reference sites is Nature Education’s Scitable.com. You’ll notice that at the top right of their home page is a simple box that lists 4 things you can DO on their science library and personal learning web site: